


A Most Considerate Suicide

by Writernon



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Death, Depression, Gen, Grieving John, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Loss of Faith, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Out of Character, Poison, Post Reichenbach, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, suicide planning, tunnel-vision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 19:23:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1196550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Writernon/pseuds/Writernon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>HEAVY WARNING: If suicide, depression, or self-harm are issues that cause you distress to read in a fiction, please consider not reading this fic.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>John decides to kill himself and doesn't want to bother anyone when he does it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Most Considerate Suicide

**Author's Note:**

> I might take this down later or orphan it.
> 
>  
> 
> This came out of a very black day. But so did I.

The day John Watson decided to kill himself it was a relief. It all made sense; there was a plan, if vague, and a way forward.

_Need to finish off a few things, make sure no one will be disturbed. It's for the best._

He stopped going out to pubs for the minimal human contact he could find. He wrote friendly but distant emails in response to queries, he turned down social plans. 

_They don't need me dragging them down. It's better if they lose track of me._

Mycroft was another matter. John had not had words with him since before Sherlock's death, and those words had been strong ones. He felt Mycroft watching him still, though. He had to look normal, no one should worry about him at all. 

He sat up late one night, a month having gone by with no one trying to contact him at all, and composed an email.

> I realize now that you did what you thought was right at the time. I know you never would have asked for the consequences that brought, and that they are their own punishment. I forgive you, and I hope you'll understand when I say I wish to never see, hear or speak with you again.

The next day, the cameras didn't seem to follow him anymore.

_Good._

He took fewer shifts, something he had to keep from doing too swiftly. He felt like a hypocrite whenever someone came in to talk about depression, but not too much. "It gets better," was for everyone else, just not him.

He was down to a shift a week, then a half-shift here and there then a week passed without being called in. Then two. His severance packet arrived in the mail; He thought of pinning it to the mantle with Sherlock's knife but then whoever found him might feel like getting sacked was what drove him to this. He wasn't being driven; he was going willingly. 

As a boy, his family had gone to church, C of E, and for a while he had believed. Oh, how he had believed. When he prayed about the small and large sorrows of his days and offered his problems up to God, he felt lighter. Whole, and at peace. 

He'd lost that faith long before puberty. In this decision though, and the motions to make it real, he felt that same weightlessness of soul. He smiled and joked with himself alone now. It had been hard to do, but he'd managed to withdraw even from Mrs Hudson, introducing her to a seniors charity group one of his patients had mentioned. It kept her busy, and after that it was just a matter of not being in or around when she had a chance to stop in. He felt at peace, calm. Ready. 

Somewhere something in him told him that calmness should frighten him, and that the lack of fright about the calmness should frighten him even more. It all folded under a layer of cool contentment. There was a plan. He would do this and it would all be over.

A month and a half after the severance packet, the day arrived. Mrs Hudson had gone on another charity-holiday, this time to a poor rural village in the south of Spain that had had flooding. John's bank balance was not fantastic, but not dire. He suspected Mycroft had been adding to it, but had stopped caring. Nothing about what he'd be leaving behind would say "John Watson killed himself in desperation". This wasn't desperation. This was the opposite. He'd been desperate before. Alone. Now he had this, and it was all going according to plan.

He'd stocked away several small prescriptions over time, written out by different physicians, never himself, filled by different pharmacists. Nothing remarkable. A week of sleeping pills here and there, some antihistamines, anti-emetics, other medications to build into a cocktail that would stay down and take him down with it. A bottle of decent scotch as a chaser because why not. He'd thought about the gun - his old ally - but didn't want to leave too much mess, or leave a scene too traumatizing to the first responders. He supposed they'd seen a lot, but he was used to war zones, they weren't.

He stopped eating two days before, taking pills to void his system of waste as much as possible. He'd considered an enema, but god only knows what the M/E would make of that. Some form of sexual accident. He had debated it; might give Harry a laugh.

John hoped Molly wouldn't have to do his autopsy. She'd had enough pain in her life after Sherlock. She barely talked to anyone. He hoped she didn't have a plan like his too. But she'd be fine. She had co-workers and family, and that air of knowing that someone somewhere worried about her. No one was worrying about John Watson anymore.

The morning of, John drank the last 500 ml of rehydration and glucose solution. Enough to get him through the day. He took a walk, out to the Park, around the Boating Lake and back. He smiled and waved at the staff at Speedy's before going upstairs. It was a good day. 

He took the shower curtain and laid it in the bathtub at first, but decided that might be too onerous for the paramedics to extract his corpse. The shower curtain wasn't too sturdy, he should have bought a tarpaulin. No help for it now. He took the curtain back out of the tub and laid it on the floor in the sitting room. He then got several old towels and laid them in a narrow pallet in the center, less for comfort, more for cleanliness. If anything remained to be voided in his system as he died, he didn't want it soiling Mrs. Hudson's carpets.

For speed of absorption, he'd crushed the pills down to powder in a coffee grinder he'd found at a thrift shop, ready to mix into the first tumbler of scotch. He went to the loo at three in the afternoon and voided his bowels and bladder as completely as he could, then swallowed two of the antiemetics dry so his system would start absorbing those first. Then he went and changed his clothes. Plain dark grey shirt, plain black trousers. No shoes or socks. No point. 

He felt light-headed, euphoric even. Soon. It was going to be over soon.

Feeling a little bad about dirtying a glass after he'd cleaned everything so as not to leave any sort of a mess, John poured in the powdered pills and topped it up with scotch. The powder sat on the bottom of the tumbler in a mass until John stirred it vigorously. It spiraled up; a typhoon in the glass. Most of it wouldn't dissolve in the scotch, but the tiny particles would hit his system like wildfire when he drank it down. 

He took the glass and scotch bottle over to the shower curtain laid on the floor. With some maneuvering he sat on the towels, then held the glass before his eyes, watching the particles swirl.

No messages. No last posts or last phone calls. No one needed to worry or try to save him. No note. He had written an actual letter to the ambulance station nearby though, telling them where his corpse would be and where to find a key to get into the building, so they could clear it away before Mrs. Hudson returned from Spain. The letter would be picked up from the letterbox on the corner tomorrow morning and delivered the next day. Mrs Hudson wouldn't return until the following Monday. John would be dead in a few hours.

It was all set, and it was time.

"Cheers," he said, raising the poisoned glass to himself and draining it in one long gulp.

The taste was foul, but manageable. He was glad of taking the anti-emetic first. John chased the foul cup with a deep swallow directly from the bottle, then filled the glass halfway and set the bottle out of the way on a looming side table so it couldn't be knocked over.

His stomach lurched, but didn't rebel. Acid burned up the back of his throat. In the mix of pills he'd ground up another half pack of antiemetics; it should be enough. John shifted so he was mostly laying on the towels, propped on one elbow, then drained the glass again. He tried to place the empty glass on the table but missed, sending it to the floor with a short bump and roll. Nothing to drain away.

John sighed and set the glass upright on the floor before laying back down straight on the towelling, dizzy, nauseous, fighting intense cramping.

 _Knew it wouldn't be fun,_ he thought, tears leaking from his eyes at the pain. _Not supposed to be._

He breathed shallowly, waiting for the sleep meds and alcohol to take him under so he wouldn't feel the remainder of the process of dying. His heart lurched painfully in his chest.

At this point in a fairy tale, a hero would come to save him. No heroes any more. No one left caring about him; he'd just be a sad footnote in the lives of anyone who had known him. They'd move on, freed of the burden he had become. It was better this way.

Soon the drowsiness took him past the pain, and he closed his eyes. 

_I'm done. It's over._

He barely heard the crash of the door opening as he slid fully down into the dark.


End file.
